by Meg Howrey
“Oh, I love having my scalp rubbed,” says Mr. Shushbagger.
Mireille knows he is loving it, she can almost feel how good it feels to him.
Her father had once told her that she was an empath. That she felt things deeply because she was sensitive to others, picked up on their emotional cues so completely that she took them within her own body and mind. That she didn’t intellectualize her emotions. That all of this was a gift.
• • •
LUKE HAD WANTED to know her reaction to the thought experiment. If a record of her cells had been copied and teletransported to Mars, and re-created perfectly, would she still be her, or a replica?
“How badly do I want to go to Mars?” she asked.
“Oh. That’s not. I mean the thought experiment—”
“Okay, sure, perfect replicas of your cells and all your memories and everything make you the same person. Except you’re now also a person who got teletransported. And who is now on Mars. Wouldn’t that change you? And I know this isn’t the point of the thing, but I don’t think anyone should be teletransported to Mars. It should hurt a little, to go to Mars.”
“Okay, that’s our session,” Mireille says. She wipes the guy’s feet with warm towels, and gently places his robe across his knees, aligns his slippers on the mat. “How do you feel?” she asks, placing a calm and benedictory palm against his forehead.
“Oh my God, I feel amazing,” he says. “You’re really gifted.”
Mireille takes her hand away.
DMITRI
Dmitri is having a picnic. He is sitting on a blanket, on a hill, in a public park. There are people on another blanket not ten feet from him, older people, adults. A woman bounces a baby on her lap and says, “Oopsadaisy! Oopsadaisy!” One of the others on her blanket is capturing this on a screen. Dmitri doesn’t know how the people on that blanket connect to each other—which is married to whom or are they a family or what. Dmitri pulls his baseball cap down lower.
“Teach me something to say in Russian,” Robert says.
“Chush’ sobach’ya.” A group of schoolchildren are being marched across the stone rotunda below their hill. Everyone is talking about how nice the weather is. The weather in New York is pretty much the same as at home. Freeze your balls off in winter and sweat your balls off in summer and ten good days in between. This is one of those days.
“Chush’ sobach’ya.” Robert’s accent is not bad. “What am I saying?”
“It is like bullshit,” Dmitri says.
This is Dmitri’s first date. That is what Robert is calling it. The last time they’d seen each other, Robert said, “I think we need to have our first date.” Dmitri thought he was joking. They had met up ten times, more than Dmitri had ever met up with anyone else.
It was not a joke. Robert had brought a picnic. He’d brought a blanket and forks and boxed water and containers of fruit salad and beet salad and couscous and two cookies. He’d also brought a rose, which he had told Dmitri was for him.
The two cookies would’ve been enough, Dmitri thought, to signal that something else was now going on, something that was not getting hot and getting hard and stars exploding. The two cookies really would have been sufficient. The rose made it ridiculous. The rose was a funeral offering. But he’s always known it couldn’t last. Ten visits to Robert’s dormitory. There was always going to be a reckoning.
“Hey, relax,” Robert says. “Just because we’re outside doesn’t mean we have to pretend like we don’t know each other.” Robert reaches across the lineup of picnic foods between them and puts his hand on Dmitri’s thigh. “Or do we?”
“No, it’s fine,” Dmitri says, but Robert takes his hand away and leans back on his elbows. Dmitri is not familiar with Robert’s body like this: clothed, closed.
Dmitri glances again at the threesome to their left. The woman seems to want to cuddle Oopsadaisy, who is kicking her in the face. The two guys are now talking to each other. Everyone appears to be living some kind of life.
“Okay, you do understand that it’s not illegal here, right?” Robert asks.
“What is not illegal?” Dmitri reminds himself that he can just get up and walk away, at any point. Ilya has a rehearsal at his dance school today, which means that Dmitri has four free hours in the city, instead of three. Thirty-eight minutes of this has already been wasted in getting to Central Park. If eating the food doesn’t take too long, they can still get back to Robert’s room and do some stuff before the four hours are up. He has told Robert that his cousin agreed to give him a little more time today.
“Being gay,” Robert says. “Nobody is going to be upset if we make out right now. Nobody cares about that. I mean, I understand if you’re not out in Russia.”
“People are out in Russia,” Dmitri says. “They’re just private. It’s not a big deal.” In fact, he knows almost nothing about gay life in Russia, except that he’d heard something about people pretending to be gay online so they could turn in real gays to the police. They were called Hunters.
“Okay,” Robert says. “Never mind.”
Dmitri knew this kind of thing was going to happen. In his English class last week, the teacher had made them read a poem. He can’t remember how it began but the last lines were about the world ending not with a bang but a whimper.
Robert takes two blocks from his bag and makes a space on the blanket, fits his latest instrument into the blocks. He hands two small hammers to Dmitri.
“It’s a medieval dulcimer,” he says. “With modifications. Try it out. I want to know how intuitive it is.”
Dmitri looks at the metal instrument. He taps a few disks on the top row. The sound is dull. He uses the head of the hammer to send a disk sliding down a rail, and the rest of the disks on the wire rattle in sympathy. The sound hurts his teeth a little.
“It’s kind of an awful sound,” Robert says. “Right? I sort of love it, though.”
“It makes teeth hurt. It is medieval dentist dulcimer.”
“Ha. Keep going. You get used to it.” Robert stretches out and puts his hands behind his head. Dmitri taps at the strings, feeling desperate. He is dying for Robert.
And he is tired. He feels like everyone is leaving him behind. Ilya doesn’t need his help. His mother is becoming involved in Alexander’s business. His father is going to go to Mars and doesn’t seem to notice that Dmitri’s letters to him are full of nothing.
“You can be ashamed of yourself even if nobody says what you do is shameful,” Dmitri says.
“That sounds like self-hatred,” Robert says.
Dmitri doesn’t reply. He swipes at disks randomly. There are five rows, he realizes, like a musical scale. And indeed, each row has a different tone, though they’re not arranged in the right order.
“What’s your father like?” Robert asks.
“He’s okay. He’s ordinary guy. He works for a shoe company.”
Robert nods. “He knows you’re gay?”
Dmitri says nothing.
“Or whatever you are.”
“This is not picnic,” Dmitri says. “This is something else.” He has to end things with Robert anyway. It’s all going to come out. Dmitri looks up from the instrument. Maybe it’s already out.
“This is chush’ sobach’ya,” Robert says. “It bothers me that you never kiss me. And I’d like you to stop with the fake cousin and, you know, actually talk to me. That’s what a relationship is.”
“Not everything has to be a relationship.” Dmitri says this quickly, and forgets to use his thicker accent and bad grammar. Soon it will be impossible to have secrets. His father has only three more months of the simulation, and then he will be out and Prime will probably announce the crew publicly. There are pictures of Dmitri out there. Standing next to his father at Baikonur, at Vostochny. There will be many more pictures, his whole life story. He hadn’t rea
lized it, but this time had been his only freedom.
“Everything is in a relationship to something else,” Robert says. “So is every person.”
The trio with the baby call out, “Excuse me? Excuse me?” The woman who got kicked in the face by her baby is holding up her screen. She’s been recording Dmitri.
“What’re your handles?” she calls out. “That’s so cool, what you’re doing.”
“My handle is fuck you,” Dmitri says. “And I’m not doing anything. This isn’t anything. Leave me alone.” Dmitri drops the hammers and stands up.
“Hey, hey.” One of the guys stands up too. “What’s your problem?” He pulls out his screen.
“It’s okay, Oliver,” says the baby-woman. “It’s fine.”
“Are you making a video out of me telling you to leave me alone?” Dmitri says to the guy. “I am sixteen years old. You put that up and I will sue you. My parents will sue you. I have rights. I am a minor. What you are doing is illegal.”
Now Robert is standing. Dmitri has not been shouting, but he can see that he’s attracted the attention of a few other people on the hill. Every person has a screen. You never know. This is why outside is shit. Two cookies and a rose, it’s a fucking joke.
“I’m so sorry,” says the baby-woman. “Look, I just thought it sounded pretty. I’m deleting it.” She shakes her screen and then looks up at the man.
“It’s cool, it’s cool,” says the other guy of the threesome. “Oliver, delete the thing. You don’t need this.”
“You don’t have to be such a jerk,” says baby-woman, it’s not clear to whom. Maybe to her baby.
Dmitri grabs his bag and begins marching down the hill. He’s never kissed a man with his tongue. He’s kissed girls that way. He kissed a girl that way last week. It wasn’t anything with a girl, but it would be something with a man. Now he just wants to get inside somewhere, where people can’t see him. There is a tunnel to the right of the fountain, the under section of a bridge.
“Hey.” Robert’s voice echoes in the tunnel.
Robert’s got the shopping bag in one hand and the blanket is over his shoulder and the instrument is sticking out of the top of his backpack. “What was that?”
“I don’t want to talk here,” Dmitri says. He knows how to get out of the park. He can run if he has to, run without stopping.
“Yeah, you don’t want to talk anywhere.”
“It’s okay. It’s over.”
“Yeah, no kidding it’s over. You’re sixteen. You can still act like a human being.”
Dmitri stops. They’re on the other side of the tunnel and exposed again, but at least out of sight of the hill people. He can follow this path out of the park. The park benches on either side of the lane are filled with people. The world is crammed, is stuffed with bodies.
“Human beings are the worst,” Dmitri says. “You should say that I could still act like a wolf or elephant. At least an elephant doesn’t tell lies.” He starts walking, but Robert keeps pace with him. Dmitri is embarrassed by his last words, so dramatic and childish.
“What are you lying about?” Robert asks. His voice has no anger in it, as if he’s only mildly curious, or as if Dmitri had said “I like cheese” and Robert merely wanted to know which cheeses. This makes Dmitri feel calm. He takes a deep breath, but can’t think of what or how to say things. It would be nice if they could just walk in silence for a little bit.
“Look, we can be friends,” Robert says. “Obviously I like you. Because I have problems, I guess. Your manners are atrocious, and you’re a liar. Are you even Russian?”
“I’m a liar,” Dmitri agrees. “I’m Russian. My English is fluent unless I’m writing. I’m sixteen. You should leave me alone. Fuck. Fucking shit.”
“Who’s your cousin?” Robert shifts his stuff into one hand so he can walk closer to Dmitri. Their arms are almost touching. Dmitri would really like to die, really.
“My little brother. He goes to a ballet school here on Saturdays. We live in New Jersey. I’ve never kissed a guy. In the real way.”
“That one I sort of figured out.”
All these people on park benches, people walking. There are crazy people here, homeless people. Nothing is ever going to be really good.
“My father is a cosmonaut,” Dmitri says.
“Okay, let’s stop for a second.”
Dmitri stops, but not for Robert. He is having trouble breathing.
“You think I’m crazy?” he asks. “You can look it up. I thought you already looked me up.”
“I tried to look you up,” Robert says. “I couldn’t find anything. I didn’t think you were in high school. I thought you were an illegal alien. I thought maybe you were in the Russian mafia. I thought you were a hustler. I hide my wallet before you come over.”
Dmitri wants to sit down. He wants to lie down. He wants to go back home to Russia, to childhood. He wants to go to space and just do things and not think, like his father.
“Okay,” he says. “I live in New Jersey with my brother and my mother and stepfather. I go to Maplewood High School. On Saturdays I bring my brother to ballet classes in the city. My father is a cosmonaut. An astronaut. He’s in Utah with Prime Space right now. Pretty soon, he might be going to go to Mars. I love him. He has everything. My brother is also this incredibly talented person. I love him too. It’s not that I am jealous of them, or maybe it’s only a little jealousy. Everyone loves them, you see. I love them too. I know I am not lovable the way they are. I am not remarkable. I am good at school, but am I brilliant? No. I don’t have new ideas. My father, he is amazed by what Ilya can do. He cannot dance like that. I am not creative. There is nothing I will ever do that will be as good as my father, and I cannot amaze him. No. I am not even very good at making this confessional speech. I am pretending that I have father problem. A father problem. It is not a father problem. I don’t have a gay problem, I don’t have a father problem. I don’t want my father making a speech to the whole planet about how he loves his gay son. I don’t want to be special for only being gay, that isn’t anything amazing at all.”
Dmitri is not crying, though he does feel very ill, and is worried that he might get a nosebleed. He pinches his nose together and tilts his head back.
“Sometimes I get a nosebleed,” he says to Robert.
Robert pats him on the shoulder.
It’s okay. He’s not bleeding. He looks at Robert.
“Man,” Robert says. “If you ask me, I don’t think you have a problem. You’re just a little sad and the world is so stupid.”
It’s maybe not so much a decision. Dmitri has to go somewhere, and he is following the pull of gravity, which means to fall.
It doesn’t go perfectly. It is much more shocking than anything else. He can’t even tell if he likes it; Robert is carrying too many bags and Dmitri bangs his teeth against Robert’s at the beginning, and this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends. He doesn’t know what he is doing, he is still probably sad, but Dmitri—Russian, liar, lover, son of cosmonaut—has his first real kiss.
HELEN
Tonight they are eating rehydrated shrimp and rice and for vegetables it is green beans. Everyone likes this dinner very much, even more than some of the fancy recipes that have been sent up from Prime. It is easy to make, and good for a day like today, where they’ve been testing their knowledge of material covered over a year ago now.
“So how did everyone do on the last quiz?” Helen asks, spearing a green bean. “I had trouble remembering the protocol for CPB.”
Helen is hoping that the subject of postmortem decisions for the astronaut who has died in space will cheer Sergei up. He is doing well, she is very proud of his performance and general behavior, but he does get gloomy in the sort of interstitial moments between activities. Sergei has excellent gallows humor, and exercising it gives
him pleasure.
She has no real way of knowing how much Sergei is hanging on to the idea that they’d really gone to Mars. Perhaps he’d come to his senses completely. There is only one thing she can be absolutely sure of right now, and that is her own skin.
“Ah,” Yoshi says. “I had no trouble with CPB because I remembered describing it to my wife.”
Yoshi talks about his wife a lot now. This, Helen feels, is probably good. It is noticeable, though. She is doing noticeable things too. Her voice has become more gentle, even she can hear it.
But they have held together, one for all and all for one. In their training sims, they continue to score high marks. People are not disappearing into their sleeping compartments, or skipping exercise, or complaining about the food. They are not testy with each other, they are not blaming everything on Mission Control.
“I got as far as ‘stick my dead body in the bag and hang me outside,’” Helen says now. “And I remembered the basics of the promession process: after my corpse is frozen, use RoMeO’s arm to vibrate me until I shatter and become a nice powder, then dehydrate my powder until it is dust, then put the dust in a can.” The way Helen says this, it sounds like a poem, she can’t help it.
“It is not in the protocol, but they should add that we take a label and put your name on it and stick it on the can,” Sergei says. “Because it would not be good to confuse you with can of protein powder.”
There, now. That’s her boy, Sergei.
“I know it is a cross-cultural revulsion, a taboo—” Yoshi stands and collects their empty bowls, “the idea of consuming the body of the departed. And yet I remember a story I read, where this is done by a wife, of her husband. And it was very beautiful.”
“Mmhmm, do you think this was a metaphor for love?” Helen asks. Curing Yoshi of romantic sentiment in the evenings isn’t as easy as curing Sergei of depression, but she does her best. As with Sergei, she applies gentle pressure in the direction of the wound. If Yoshi wants to make all his feelings into something grand, then grand they shall be. “Perhaps a metaphor for grief.”